Mitsuya Co., Ltd. (Shinagawa City)

Business Category : Processing(metal)

Created on 2016-3-3
Updated on 2016-3-3

Mitsuya Co., Ltd. (Shinagawa City)

Mitsuya Co., Ltd. has engaged in plating business since before the War. Highly evaluated for its technologies accumulated for years, it has become an immensely trusted firm in leading-edge technology fields of mainly electronics and telecommunications and in 2008 was ranked among the “Best Spirted Small to Medium-Sized Manufacturers 300” selected by the Small and Medium Enterprise Agency in Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry. What are locational advantages for a firm running the business in Shinagawa, Tokyo for years? We asked president Seiichiro Kusama.

Technologies employed by Space Shuttle "Endeavour"

Image of plating might be mostly of decoration purposes but in fact our firm, founded in 1931, has been fulfilling functional needs including anti-rust as it has a root of being a Navy-designated factory. After the War, we offered alternative anti-rust functions to then expensive stainless steel, engaging in plating processes for components of telecom equipment/switches and others. Then the high-growth period helped expand our businesses with leading telecom equipment makers. We have polished our technologies through responding to challenging requests from clients with our corporate sprit “we never decline business offers even of challenging requests and work also hard for small lot orders.” In addition, having hired university grad engineers from early on, we have focused on enhancing production technologies and development power as well as indispensable technologies for daily works. We have run our business always with a vision for how we should be at a time 10-20 years ahead. Thanks to these efforts, we are now able to satisfy requests from customers in electrical, electronics and telecom areas through materializing more sophisticated physical properties of plating than anti-rust, such as anti-wear for metals and low contact resistance. In 1992, we contributed to an experiment for semiconductor materials under a zero gravity environment in NASA Space Shuttle "Endeavour," as our high-reflection special gold-plating technologies were used for its sophisticated experimental apparatus for alloy generation. We believe these results were achieved through our having responded to requests from long-standing customers.

Plating, an area where technological capabilities of Japanese stand out

We believe Japan’s plating technologies are globally competitive enough. Functionality of final goods is sometimes unsatisfactory without plating but its problem is defects are not detected from the surface. Japanese plating technicians keep defect rates very low as they faithfully follow rules whereas overseas technicians tend to change jobs frequently and are thus unlikely to master highest skills. As such, we think technological capabilities of Japanese are much required in plating processes which heavily depend on individual skills.

Reason to run business in Tokyo

Overseas expansion could be a choice as globalization is imperative even for a company of our size under the situation where domestic markets are shrinking. In this context, at trade fair "METALEX" held in Thailand, Shinagawa City set up a booth and backed up our exhibits. It would have been impossible for us to prepare from scratch but thanks to the City’s backup we were able to exhibit easily and get some positive senses. We once considered shutting down our operations in Tokyo and integrating production to a regional factory. But we eventually decided not, based on our business stance of doing developments upon customers’ requests. Furthermore, with our intention for global expansion, we think we should not move away from Tokyo, the place where information and traffic networks are condensed.